Luck Is Luck: Poems

by Lucia Perillo

From the snowy egret to a woman’s floating rib, nudism in America to Holy Communion, Simone de Beauvoir to Nathan’s hot dogs–the subjects in Lucia Perillo’s fourth collection of poetry lift off from surprising places and touch down on new ground. Hers is a vision like no other. In “To My Big Nose,” she “hard to imagine what the world would have looked like / if not seen through your pink shadow. / You who are built from random parts / like a mythical creature–a gryphon or sphinx– .”

Fearless, focused, ironic, irreverent, truly and deeply felt, the poems in Luck Is Luck draw upon the circumstances of being a woman, the harsh realities of nature, the comfort of familiar things, and universally recognizable anxieties about faith and grief, love and desire. In “Languedoc,” she writes, “Long ago / I might have been attracted by your tights and pantaloons / but now they just look silly, ditto for your instrument / that looks like a gourd with strings attached / (the problem is always the strings attached).”

Perillo’s versions of nature are always “Most days back then I would walk by the shrike tree, / a dead hawthorn at the base of a hill. / The shrike had pinned smaller birds on the tree’s black thorns / and the sun had stripped them of their feathers. / . . . well, hard luck is luck, nonetheless. / With a chunk of sky in each eye socket. / And the pierced heart strung up like a pearl.”

Down-to-earth, full of playful twists of language, and woven from grand themes in an accessible, appealing way, these poems pierce the heart and delight the mind. Not one word is wasted.

Genres: Poetry

98 pages, Hardcover

First published March 22, 2005

About the author

Lucia Perillo published five books of poetry. Perillo graduated from McGill University in Montreal in 1979 with a major in wildlife management and subsequently worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She completed her M.A. in English at Syracuse University, and taught at Saint Martin's College, and in the creative writing program at Southern Illinois University. Her work appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Kenyon Review. Luck Is Luck was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and won the Kingsley Tufts Prize. A former MacArthur fellow, Perillo lived in Olympia, Washington with her husband.

Reviews

[M Delea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Lucia Perillo's work, so I went into this book already a fan. This book is from 2005; Perillo died in 2016. Poetry lost a wonderful voice.

Below are some of my favorite titles, lines, and poems from this collection.

Titles; To My Big Nose; The Crows Start Demanding Royalties; On the High Suicide Rates of Dentists; Nudism in America; Poem Without Breasts; News From the Republic of Housecoats; The Afterlife of the Fifties Dads; and Salmon Song

Poems: all of them. Honestly, I love all poems in this collection.

Lines:

Instead, think elephant seals: all snout and lobe and whisker.
All glory effluence and ectomorphic musk.
--from "Fizz Ed"

What do the dallies say in December?
Their only tongue is the language of stalks.
--from "Given Unlimited Space, the Dead Expand Limitlessly"

And when the moon is fat and handsome, I know we should be grateful
that its face is only metaphor
--from Fubar

Here is the trouble with visiting the past:
it means dallying so long in the company of the dead.
--from Conscription Papers

I could go on, but I won't. The poems here are tight, a fine mixture of quirky sensibility and deep meanings. There are a lot of crows, a lot of scents, and a lot of observations about poetry and art and death.

I recommend this book to anyone writing poetry, students of poetry, and those who enjoy reading contemporary poetry that is not off the MFA workshop assembly line.

[Jan Priddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is it possible I read this book straight through in two days? I recognized what I was reading only nearer the end than the beginning.

I am still not entirely sure what I had already read by Perillo that led me to buy this book of poems. I found it on my to-read pile and admired Audubon on the cover. I opened to read a poem and found I could not stop. She writes about hard things, about death and loss and the spawning of salmon. She is not the least depressing, but doesn't promise more than she proves. Her narratives lay the world open to her voice. She uses alliteration and rhyme and a rhythm that carries music to my bones. I suppose I shall go looking for more. I suppose I should spend a month studying how she does this magical thing, this poetry.

Perillo might be my favorite poet. That she lives in Olympia, off the freeway on my drive from my current home to my previous one, that she has MS, that she is about my age and of a similar sense of connection to people and animals and wilderness perhaps . . . perhaps that is why.

[Stephen Lamb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bought this collection after loving “In the Confessional Mode, with a Borrowed Movie Trope” as taught by Ellen Bass in a Craft Lecture.

“Oh we are blown, we are bags,
we are moved by such elegant chaos.
Call it god. Only because it is an expletive that fits.
His body, his beauty, all fucked up now.
God.Then the air cuts out, and then we drop.”

[Amie Whittemore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lucia is brilliant. Go read all her poems.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally, I read one of Lucia Perillo's short stories, "Bad Boy Number Seventeen," and was amazed by how she could turn a joke beyond just being funny. Without diminishing the honesty of the joke, she found a way to frame her humor within the context of a larger sense of tragedy—ultimately, entrenching us in a character's pain while simultaneously showing us how they cope with that pain. In Luck Is Luck, Perillo continues exploring this territory, bringing a sort of double-edged hilarity into musings and reflections on anything from daily happenstance to religion to the death of her father. These are by no means little pfffts (like the farting of aphids). They're really quite moving.

Furthermore, these poems are refreshing, and that's important. Above all of the technical aspects—her superb use of semicolons, parenthesis, italics, line breaks, etc.—Perillo's poetry is honest and direct. She never reaches for a banal image; each one is a paragon of clarity (a peach!) and this helps lock the reader into her history, her environment, her thinking. And with a conversational diction, she still somehow manages to discuss complicated matters! She isn't afraid to examine issues of gender, humanity's role in the beautiful but brutal natural world, or our need to "risk delight" (as Jack Gilbert would say). Simply amazing work. I could go on.

Favorites: "The Floating Rib" (18), "Nathan's" (24), "White Bird/Black Drop" (29), "Urban Legend" (65), "Eulogy from the Boardwalk Behind the KFC" (89), and "Chum" (97).

[Sherry Chandler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I seem to be doing straight 4s lately with my ratings but I really did enjoy these poems. I first encountered Lucia Perillo at the Indiana University Writers Conference about five years ago and I've been a fan ever since. I am always impressed by fearlessness and Perillo strikes me as fearless in looking at death, disability, sex, and concepts of physical beauty. Plus there's this whimsy that constantly delights me. Who else sees crows as "Little Elvises"?

The Crows Start Demanding Royalties

Of all the birds, they are the ones
who mind their being armless most:
witness how, when they walk, their heads jerk
back and forth like rifle bolts.
How they heave their shoulders into each stride
as if they hoped that by some chance
new bones there would come popping out
with a boxing glove on the end of each.

Little Elvises, the hairdo slicked
with too much grease, they convene on my lawn
to strategize for their class-action suit. . . .

[Sandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

In three parts, somewhat memoir-ish, organized from youth through old age, with flashbacks. Tone is humorous, edgy, irreverent. She is able to observe clearly where she is and render an original, satisfying appraisal. Great detail on birds, fish and religion. She has a relevant currency, and I want to read more of her work.

[Erik · Rating 3 out of 5]

a moving poet with an eye for the mundane details of life and how they and we interact. the poem from which the title of the book derives is powerful and the full line reads, "even bad luck / is luck." i like that.

[Janie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A feast. Well curated.

Line for 2013-Books found poem
- "Because God did not want to look down from his going up / and see the tops of female heads—go figure— / come every Easter my sister and I wore hats / instead of our normal bobby-pinned mantillas."